The Art of Intimacy (9 page)

Only connect.
Wisely, Forster didn’t specify who or how many would be connecting, nor what the nature of that connection might be. Intimacy in fiction can be rendered as a space between that is as close as a breath, or as great as a century. We hunger for intimacy in art, and yet what we hunger for is not always the happily ever after, the joyous reunion. I find, scribbled among the notes I made in the dark while I was watching the slide show in
Scopophilia,
“Making visible what, without you, I would perhaps have never seen.” What Goldin might have been quoting, if anything, and to what image this phrase was attached, I neglected to write down. I left the specifics somewhere in the dark. But when I come to fiction, both as a reader and as a writer, I wish for it to make visible something that, without it, I would perhaps have never seen. The reason that I might not have seen it isn’t that it is so rare, but that it can sometimes be nearly impossible to truly see that which is as omnipresent as air. The distance of art allows me to see the emotional medium that surrounds us all.

And so I am grateful for the company of these others that makes visible the invisible: among them, two children meeting in a strange house that is home to neither of them; a husband and wife who retain an obdurate foreignness to one another; a family at a dinner table; an odd pair of lovers; two women who know one another’s secret; two men at sea; a torturer and his victim; mother and child; writer and reader. The space between any and all of these people is not easy to find or express. The tools used by the various writers to delineate them are inventive: the subjunctive, shared perspective, image, off-the-page implication, the deployment of white space, and so on.

One might conclude from this that unlikely intimacies require original narrative techniques, but it seems more likely to me that the space between is, itself, a terrain that requires inventiveness, daring, and perhaps a few unsettling ideas: that empathy for the other is not a luxury but a moral requirement, even of children; that deep love, even within a marriage, is not necessarily a reassuring or self-affirming experience; that intimacy can be communal, disembodied, and semiconscious; that the recognition, found through sex, that passes between any couple is rare, fragile, and can’t be possessed; that the intimacy that seeks to destroy can be nearly indistinguishable from the sense of self. Perhaps the most fundamental idea that these writers share is the idea that every space between is unique and consequential; that it has its own duration, which is not necessarily equal to its importance; and that it requires a participation by its characters that is not predictable or automatic. Being a child, being in love, being in grief, being in a family, being undone, being in bed with someone else: we might think we know what these things mean, but, as these writers show us so well, we don’t. We don’t know anything about it.

STACEY D’ERASMO
is the author of
The Sky Below,
a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year and a
Los Angeles Times
Favorite Book of the Year;
A Seahorse Year;
and
Tea,
a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year. A former Stegner Fellow and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, she is an assistant professor at Columbia University. Her nonfiction work has appeared in the
New York Times Book Review,
the
New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, Boston Review, New England Review,
and
Ploughshares,
among other publications. Her fourth novel,
Wonderland,
will be published in 2014.